The latest revelations were first reported Sunday in the German magazine Der Spiegel, which lifted
the lid on a division of the NSA known as Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, described as an elite team of hackers specializing in stealing data from the toughest of targets.

Snowden interviewer says NSA leaker launched “global debate”Citing internal NSA
documents, the magazine said TAO's mission was "Getting the
ungettable," and quoted an unnamed intelligence official as saying that
TAO had gathered "some of the most significant intelligence our country
has ever seen."

One of the most striking
reported revelations concerned the NSA's alleged ability to spy on Microsoft
Corp.'s crash reports, familiar to many users of the Windows operating system
as the dialogue box which pops up when a game freezes or a Word document dies.
The reporting system is intended to help Microsoft engineers improve their
products and fix bugs, but Der Spiegel said the NSA was also sifting through
the reports to help spies break into machines running Windows.

One NSA document
cited by the magazine appeared to poke fun at Microsoft's expense, replacing
the software giant's standard error report message with the words: "This
information may be intercepted by a foreign sigint (signals intelligence)
system to gather detailed information and better exploit your machine."

Microsoft said
that information sent by customers about technical issues in such a manner is
limited.

"Microsoft does
not provide any government with direct or unfettered access to our customer's
data," a company representative said in an email Sunday. "We would
have significant concerns if the allegations about government actions are
true."

Microsoft is
one of several U.S. firms that have demanded more transparency from the NSA —
and worked to bolster their security — in the wake of the revelations of former
intelligence worker Edward Snowden, whose disclosures have ignited an
international debate over privacy and surveillance.

Hayden: Snowden made U.S. intelligence “infinitely weaker”Sunday's Der Spiegel report also cited a 2008 mail order catalog-style list of vulnerabilities that NSA spies could exploit from companies such as Irvine, California-based Western Digital Corp. or Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Inc. The magazine said that suggested the agency was "compromising the technology and products of American companies."

Der Spiegel said TAO had a
catalog of high-tech gadgets for particularly hard-to-crack cases, including
computer monitor cables specially modified to record what is being typed across
the screen, USB sticks secretly fitted with radio transmitters to broadcast
stolen data over the airwaves, and fake base stations intended to intercept
mobile phone signals on the go.

Old-fashioned
methods get a mention too. Der Spiegel said that if the NSA tracked a target
ordering a new computer or other electronic accessories, TAO could tap its
allies in the FBI and the CIA, intercept the hardware in transit, and take it
to a secret workshop where it could be discretely fitted with espionage
software before being sent on its way.

Intercepting
computer equipment in such a way is among the NSA's "most productive
operations," and has helped harvest intelligence from around the world,
one document cited by Der Spiegel stated.

Der Spiegel did not
explicitly say where its cache of NSA documents had come from, although the
magazine has previously published a series of stories based on documents leaked by Snowden,
and one of Snowden's key contacts - American documentary filmmaker Laura
Poitras - was listed among the article's six authors.

No one was immediately
available at Der Spiegel to clarify whether Snowden was the source for the
latest story.

Another company mentioned by Der
Spiegel, though not directly linked with any NSA activity, was Juniper Networks
Inc., a computer network equipment maker in Sunnyvale, Calif.

"Juniper Networks recently became
aware of, and is currently investigating, alleged security compromises of
technology products made by a number of companies, including Juniper," the
company said in an email. "We take allegations of this nature very
seriously and are working actively to address any possible exploit paths."

If necessary, Juniper said, it would,
"work closely with customers to ensure they take any mitigation steps."